Something has gone a bit wrong with the Deutsche Bahn (DB). Of the last six trains I have tried to take, two were cancelled and three were delayed, including the one I am currently on. On the other hand, my train from Paddington to Swindon on Monday was just fine. I am aware this isn't exactly five sigma, but if your hypothesis was anything to do with "German efficiency" and "crap British trains", there is tension in the data.

The tension is somewhat relieved by the fact that I am writing this in the BordRestaurant on the (delayed) DB ICE to Frankfurt. Also, when uberzugmeister (I think that's the wort) announced the latest sixty minute delay, the reaction of the passengers - resigned laughter and rolled eyes reminiscent of so many British train journeys – reminded me how much I do like Germany.

Perhaps the DB should go for the Swiss strategy, of timetabling a ten-minute pause at each station, and having the train travel at half speed. Then, if there's a cow on the line or something, it's easy to catch up lost time and keep the timetable running like clockwork. The added advantage is that everyone thinks your country is huge, because it takes so long to get from one city to another.

Actually that's quite fair really. Switzerland is bigger than it looks on any map, by a factor 1/cos(45o), give or take (see diagram). And that's before you starting messing with fractals.

Hello Gelnhausen. Goodbye (very slowly) Gelnhausen.

The only point of this blog entry really is to pass the time, so if you are fed up with it, you can have your money back. If I wasn't too tight to pay the data-roaming extortion (until, maybe the EU sort it out?) I would probably be tweeting instead. Neither Deutsche Bahn nor First Great Western have managed to work out WiFi yet, it seems.

Anyway, so it goes. Monday and Tuesday I was in Swindon for my last Science Board meeting for STFC, where we pretty much wrapped our bit of our programmatic review. From the dire scenarios under "flat cash" or worse, and the capacity of the science community to do great things under something better than that, it's clear the current spending review will be a bit of a defining moment. The government has been saying some good things about the importance of science for the UK; which financial scenario they dish out will tell us all how much of that they really mean, I suppose.

Then a PhD viva in Göttingen – congratulations to new Dr. Katharina Bierwagen, who was one of a small team who made the first measurements of Z boson production accompanied by hadronic jets with ATLAS at the LHC, and gave an impressive defence. As an aside, I find it very modest that a Göttingen physicist gives a potted history of the subject that basically skips straight from Rutherford to Glashow. I'm sure there was some action in their neighbourhood inbetween those two.

And now, the train to Frankfurt, where, assuming I don't arrive more than three hours late, I should be able to catch a plane to Geneva, for meetings at CERN tomorrow.

I am getting more tetchy as I write. They even have that brilliant skill of announcing imminent arrival at the station, announcing all the connections you're going to have to run for, getting everyone standing up (and finishing their beer); and then parking for twenty minutes outside the station.

This train now seems to be participating in an experiment to test Xeno's paradox; we have been halving the distance to the station every few minutes for the last three quarters of an hour. I can see the platform but I can't touch it.

Next week, I plan to stay home. And perhaps also write a post with some content. Normal service will be restored as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway, as they say. I hope the same goes for DB.